Pay benchmarking

Interpreting pay data is an art, not a science.We gather relevant salary information from a range of sources and then carefully apply it to your roles.

Getting basic pay levels right is crucial if you are to recruit and retain your staff. We can provide an objective assessment of the market rate for any (or all) of your roles - from Chief Executive level down.

Why benchmarking is important

The savings made by not paying the going rate for a role can be outweighed by the recruitment and training costs of replacing a valued employee who has been tempted away.

Your employees are more likely to feel that they are being treated fairly if they know that you are regularly using good market data to set pay rates.

Pay benchmarking helps you to set salaries, taking account of the market rate for your organisation's size, operating sector and location.

We've helped clients who:

are restructuring a team.

are losing key staff to competitors.

have employees who are challenging their pay levels.

are concerned about equal pay risks.

'I found the report helpful and far more relevant than anything we had previously used for Executive benchmarking.'

How we can help

We can provide you with precise pay data for your roles, giving you a report that shows the market salary. This can be augmented with information on the typical bonus and benefits levels that you can expect.

We start by discussing your organisation and its reward priorities with you. Then, we will use any available job information to work out the size of each role, confirming this with you as necessary. ​

We take account of role size and external market forces in our advice to make an accurate assessment.

As pay benchmarking is all about interpreting the available data, we access a wide range of surveys that cover all sectors and locations in the UK, including our own Salary-Check database.

We also maintain our Advert Tracker database, which we use to monitor the advertised rates of 40 common roles across the UK. This provides useful information for benchmarking and indicates trends in market movements.

If appropriate, we can advise on the sourcing of additional survey data that will help to complete the picture for you.

We will then combine all of the data to provide you with a detailed report. This explains our methodology and background research, so you have the evidence that supports our findings.

Find out more

​Case study

We worked with a well-known charitable trust (who prefer to remain anonymous) to benchmark their salaries and benefits wth comparable organisations, taking account of their specialised field and national status.

Throughout the process, we engaged and met with their key stakeholders, including staff and Trustees, so that they understood our methodology and to ensure we benchmarked the organisation against appropriate comparators.

We obtained employee relations advice on the implications of our findings and then presented a range of options for the Trustees to consider, both in a comprehensive report and in person. This ensured that they were able to make informed decisions on key aspects of their reward policy.

'It was very good to work with EBRS.

​We had a tight timescale for the work and I appreciated their flexibility and responsiveness, particularly as we identified new needs as the project developed.'